


Nightmares

by Ferrenbach



Category: Gorillaz
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Comfort, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Phase Four (Gorillaz), Platonic Cuddling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-04-22 02:13:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14298528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ferrenbach/pseuds/Ferrenbach





	Nightmares

Eyelids drooping, half-asleep, she stumbles on her way to the bathroom. It is too dark to see, but a soft moan alerts her to the nature of the obstacle.

“Toochi?” she whispers, waiting for her night vision to come in. “What are you doing down there?”

A silly question, really. What he is doing is listening to Russel snore.

2-D is the nervous sort and she long thought him prone to bad dreams for this reason. It might still be true, but she has discovered as well that nightmares – and perhaps even anxiety itself – are a side-effect of long-term opioid use, making 2-D more susceptible than most.

When she was younger, he had dreamed of many nonsensical things that woke him in a cold sweat, but their surreality was easily dispelled by a walk around the studio, a drink of water, or a little bit of music. These days, his dreams are uniform, but nebulous.

Cold. Darkness. Isolation.

Loneliness.

They are not something to dispel on one’s own, so he often camps in the hallway outside Murdoc or Russel’s room, sitting up against the wall, wrapped in blankets, listening to the sound of them sleeping, trying to sleep in turn.

He never sits outside her door. She supposes she does not snore.

He never sits outside her door, but she is often the one to find him if she rises to use the bathroom or fetch herself a glass of water. She does not find him every time and the morning sometimes brings exasperated exclamations from the others, but she finds him often enough. She is up often enough.

She frequently has nightmares of her own.

She does what she has risen to do and returns to squat down next her band mate, running her fingers through his hair.

“Toochi,” she whispers in a sing-song voice. “It’s time to get up.”

2-D murmurs something indistinct, eyelids cracked open, although he does not wake entirely. He transitions slowly from sleep to awareness, leaving the waking world a soup of dreams and senses, and it takes many soft whispers and gentle pettings to bring him around.

Fortunately, she has a secret weapon. She whispers mostly in Japanese, giving her words a childish lilt, and this grabs 2-D’s attention faster than any other form of coaxing.

“Wassa matter, pun’kin?” he mumbles automatically.

“You’re on the floor,” she tells him kindly, but amused. “What are you doing down there? You ought to be in bed. Did you have a bad dream?”

“Mmn, yeah,” 2-D replies. He is not shy about his distresses, at least not in the way that most people are shy. “What’re you doin’ up?”

“Personal business,” she tells him.

“Oh. The toilet,” he murmurs, rubbing one eye with the heel of his palm. She snorts laughter into the back of her hand, still surprised by how disarmingly direct he can be. “I’s cold tonight. You’re gonna be cold if you’re up.”

He stands, swaying a bit as he unfolds and rises, and rises, and rises. He is so very tall, she sometimes feels she has not grown at all. She stands with him, but she is a foot shorter, a head shorter, and she only reaches his shoulder.

“My bed’s warm. I’ll be fine,” she tells him. “I’m worried about _you_. You’ll get a sore back if you sleep sitting up against the wall. The floor’s too hard and you’re too skinny. And old.”

2-D grins at that. She likes to tease him for being twelve years older than she although it never felt like so many, never so many at all. Not until recently when the span of time they had been apart hit her sharply in the crows feet etched around his eyes and the worry lines furrowed into his brow. He is healthier now than she remembers him, and she wonders if his sojourn in Mexico has anything to do with it, but years of drug use – both prescription and non – have taken their toll in the angles of his face and deepening bruises of his eyes.

“Got it in one, luv,” he tells her and pulls the blanket from his shoulders, throwing it around hers in spite of her protests. “D’you want some tea?”

She opens her mouth to tell him no, that they both should get some sleep, but she hears herself say yes and draws the blanket closer around her. He should be wearing it really – he has never liked the cold – but if he feels chilled, he gives no sign, merely steers her towards the kitchen and dispels the deep dark with the small light over the sink.

He hums as he prepares the tea, filling the electric kettle and plugging it in, fetching the cups, and asking her preference.

“Currant bun?” he asks her as he waits for the water to boil.

Again, she means to say no, but does not, and he toasts two of them, pulling out plates and butter and jam.

Watching him work in the half-lit kitchen, smooth and sure in an activity he has performed a dozen times, a hundred times, a thousand times before is a strange and welcome comfort. 

There is nothing perfect about 2-D. He can be crass and gross and thoroughly unlovely, an utter boy, in spite of nearing forty. Rough and ugly, too, abrasive and abraded, scarred in places that do not show on stage, in a perpetual state of bruising. He does not chew his nails, but he bites the skin beside them, leaving it ragged.

There is nothing perfect about 2-D, but that is the most perfect thing about him. Unaffected and unselfconscious – Murdoc’s presence notwithstanding – he is ease and warmth and everything ‘home’.

They’ve both opted for a nighttime blend of chamomile, lemongrass, and mint, and he warms the pot before filling it and adding the loose leaf infuser, plating up buns as it steeps.

“I’s good for bad dreams,” he says as he serves her.

“The buns or the tea?” she prompts.

“Both,” 2-D tells her, “but mostly tea, I guess. I’s warm and close. Sorry I tripped you again. I guess I must’ve if you woke me up.”

“It’s all right,” she assures him. “I was just worried about you sleeping on the floor. Was it a very bad dream?”

“Mmn, yeah. Bad enough. Mostly the same as always,” he says. “Dark, and aware of the dark. I’s different, now, with the light on. Feels a long way away. How bad was yours?”

She pauses with the bun in her mouth, and then bites into it slowly and deliberately, using chewing as an excuse not to speak for a moment.

“I just got up to use the toilet,” she reminds him.

“Yeah, but you dun usually get up, even to use the toilet, unless a bad dream wakes you up first,” 2-D says and pauses to take a drink. “Was it the lab?”

She hesitates, a bit resentful that he should usurp her role, but also knowing it was not unexpected.

“Yes.”

“New or old?”

The question does not surprise her, she has heard it before, but it throws her all the same, reminding her that she has never once told 2-D about her nightmares. Not about the lab and not about the timelines. He figured them out on his own. Not spontaneously, of course, but through careful questions, one after the other, each determined by her reactions, until he hit upon the truth. As far as she knows, he has never shared the information with Russel or Murdoc, and for that she is grateful. Grateful as well, perhaps, for his diligence in sussing out her secrets, even if it unnerves her.

Still, as much as he knows about her dreams, 2-D does not know everything. He knows the 'old' dreams concern her past and the program in which she was raised, but he does not know of the sterile visions that haunt her, the gleaming glass and stainless steel, the nervous rustle of children being shaped and honed into weapons. She had formed a certain bond with the head of the program and, as such, could not understand the high levels of stress and fear in her fellow subjects. Could not understand it at all until the last day.

You could ‘lose’ a single child. You could not ‘lose’ twenty-three.

And yet, as terrible as those dreams are, the 'new' ones are far worse.

“New,” she admits and sips from her cup.

2-D nods in understanding and says nothing else about it, talks instead of upcoming promotions. He is anxious in the face of social interactions, knowing how easily people confuse him and how easily he confuses them in turn, but he enjoys them too. He is at peace with his eccentricities – when Murdoc does not highlight them unfavourably – and naturally gregarious. There is a greater fear in saying too much that is irrelevant than in saying too little.

She smiles and tells him he will do fine. There is no avoiding it. He is, after all, the 'face' of Gorillaz, just as Murdoc is its founder, and any interview that does not feature Murdoc alone must feature him as well. She and Russel, with their finer aesthetics, will help direct the AR and social media campaigns.

When they have finished, 2-D collects the dishes and rinses them in deference to her. She smiles, knowing that, were she not here, he would have likely tossed them on the bench and forgotten about them until Russel complained about the crumbs.

She is warm and calm and sleepy again, but the stretch of hallway between the kitchen and her bedroom is dark and forbidding.

“You wanna lie down with me?” 2-D says, a strange request to anyone else, but not to her. “I could use the comp’ny. You know?”

He is lying, and she knows it.

“If it will help you sleep,” she tells him and follows him back to his room.

She dislikes his room in daylight, although she would never tell him so. It is rough and unfinished, paint cracked and peeling, its furniture reclaimed and barely functional, devoid of creature comforts other than a few soft blankets and mementos. At night, it feels even worse, as though the darkness were seeping in from the outside. Vegetation shields the window from all but the slightest smear of starlight and gives her the impression that vines and creepers have slipped in through the cracks, lining the walls with choking greenery.

It is open and exposed, without even a door, and it makes her nervous enough to hook her pinky finger in 2-D’s for fear of losing him. His hand is cool to the touch.

There are things to be done before sleep. 2-D is awake and, although he seems sleepy, wakefulness has its own impositions. He fishes a pill bottle out of a drawer and breaks contact to swallow two with a drink from the glass of water kept by his bedside. He gathers extra pillows, meting them out, ensures there are blankets enough for two. His bed is against the wall, so he climbs in first, giving her space to leave as she pleases, and draws the first sheet over him, smoothing it down on the outer side, so she might sleep on top of it.

Although it is not a common occurrence, this is not the first time they have shared sleeping quarters and she does not fear him, but climbs in on top of it all the same. As a child, she would not have cared if she were curled up against him, but now there is publicity to consider and it would take only one unfortunate situation to unleash the baying of the media. She climbs on top of it, wrapped in the blanket from the kitchen and huddles up next to him as he draws the topmost blankets over them both.

“Do you feel better?” she says, keeping up the charade.

“Much,” 2-D tells her. “I’s nice to know someone’s there.”

“You don’t feel exposed without a door?”

“If you dun have a door, no one can lock you in.”

“I see,” she says, and the creeping dark is no longer quite so threatening. “Oyasumi, niichan.”

“G’night, pun’kin.”

She closes her eyes and takes stock of the night. At ten she was little more than half 2-D’s height and, curled in the crook of his arm, she fit the length of his torso. On his side, he would draw up his knees and wrap his arms around her, a human cocoon and the most secure place in the world. Now she is much taller than that and 2-D sprawls on his back to accommodate her, head on the plane of his shoulder, one arm across her chest, the other draped over his belly, her knees pressing into his thigh. He strokes her hair gently, as though she were still a child, and the feeling is no less secure. She can hear his breathing and feel the warmth of him seep into her, reminding her of where she is and _what_ she is.

His warmth seeps into her and her joints are cartilage and bone. Blood courses through her, hot and salted. Her lungs breathe air, matching the rise and fall of his chest. Her mind is alive and active in its grey casing, slowly sinking into calm. It ticks over with electrical impulses, but they are the kind that are recharged with sleep, not wires and ports and sockets and cords. There is no grinding metal in the flexing of her fingers, in the the shift of her legs, no whir behind the glass of her eyes, no coolant, no lubricant, no silicone-like sheathe. The warmth in her chest is a deep and grateful love. No battery replaces the beat of her heart.

She will laugh and tell interviewers that the little sister has become the big sister, and in many ways it is true. She knows she has a maturity her bandmates sometimes lack. She gives emotional support in return for being given a family, as messy and dysfunctional as it might sometimes be. She will say that she gives comfort – to Russel from his worries, to Murdoc from bad trips, and to 2-D from bad dreams – and so she does, although, perhaps, not in the ways people expect.

For 2-D will fight his own battles, but he will not fight them for himself. He is not worth the effort of his courage, his focus, or his determination. Murdoc and Russel are older, with their own strengths and coping mechanisms, and he cannot fight for them either, but she… she is younger. A part of him will always remember a little girl in a FedEx crate – just as he reminds her of being a child – and children are to be cared for, even at the age of twenty-seven.

She will say that she gives comfort from bad dreams, and so she does. After all, if 2-D finds comfort in comforting her, well…

Well.

Who is she to say otherwise?


End file.
